The Death of My Sanity
by RK Ryune
Summary: King Mickey sends Sora, Donald and Goofy to a strange world to uncover the lastest threat to the multiverse. What they didn't expect was to find themselves trapped in a crappy selfinsert high school AU.


There are some things that are generally a good idea NOT to do when writing fan fiction. One of them is staying up all night to write. Another is writing during the last week of school during college. Another is writing something that you thought of in an "LOL WHAT IF" situation and then got completely plot bunnied with.

But since when has RK Ryune been someone who follows the rules?

Someone made the challenge of writing a GOOD high school alternate universe. I had the idea to write a GOOD (read: not sueish or poorly-written) self-insert. And then, I thought: what if I did both? "Betcha can't do it," my muse teased, green eyes twinkling with ever-present smarm.

So, dear muse, this is to prove you wrong.

The last day of high school was the best day of my life. No more stupid bells. No more parents lording over my studies day and night. No more sitting around for most of the day taking classes I didn't want to take. _No more idiocy_. Underclassmen leaped out of my way as I sped from the parking lot, laughing like a madwoman at my newfound freedom. College was gonna be _awesome_.

College turned out to be not as awesome as I had thought. Sure, I was free to stay up as late as I wanted and do what I wished. I could take what I wanted to take. I wasn't bound by a set schedule. But there were still rules. There were still grades to make, teachers to please, idiocy in the classroom.

And still not enough time for video games.

Well, there was, but when you're expected to learn in only a few days what would take weeks in high school, you find yourself spending quite a bit more time with a book in your hands, instead of a PS2 controller.

And so a year passed. And another year. During those two years, I fell out of love with my primary obsession Senior Year, Inuyasha, and in love with what quickly became an obsession as intense as others before it. Fan fiction, live journal communities, endless hours of YouTube videos, even more endless hours with fan art and browsing deviant art, and yet all of that did not compare to actually playing the game.

Kingdom Hearts.

Peter and Andy made serious fun of me when I came barreling down the hall towards their room in early March, screaming joyfully about the new Aladdin level I had unlocked. Or after I had picked up Kingdom Hearts 2 and screamed even louder at the discovery of Lion-shaped Sora. By the time mid-May rolled around, instead of running to my door in concern whenever they heard squealing or shrieking, and instead rolled their eyes.

"Rena's playing Kingdom Hearts?" one would ask, sighing.

"Rena's playing Kingdom Hearts," the other would confirm, shaking his head and returning to looking at baseball scores online.

College-aged fangirls can be a scary thing.

And so, it was with a great sense of achievement in early June, when I jumped up proudly from my perch on the edge of my bed, shouting with joy, "PROUD MODE, BITCHES!!" It was finished. I had beaten Proud Mode of Kingdom Hearts 2. Not much of a challenge to me, but it was still an accomplishment none the less. Peter's face, framed by brown hair in desperate need of a trim, popped around the corner of the short hallway leading to my room.

"Kingdom Hearts?" he asked in exasperation.

"You don't understand!" I said hurriedly. "Xemnas was a BITCH to beat on Proud Mode! You know those buildings? Those holy-mother-of-god BUILDINGS that he THROWS at you?"

Peter rubbed his forehead slowly as he made his way into my room. "Yes, Rena, this would only be the third time you've made me watch you beat Xemnas. If you make me stay to watch the ending **again**, I will be making commentary on why Sora and Riku are gay for each other, AGAIN, in spite of all the flailing I know you'll be doing with the 'so totally Sora/Kairi and Roxas/Namine' ending, AGAIN."

I gave him a blank stare. "But this is Proud Mode!" I emphasized, pointing dramatically at my small TV, where, sure enough, Riku and Sora were again discussing darkness and light and behaving in a less than heterosexual way.

Peter cocked an eyebrow at me. "Oh really," he drawled, leaning on the TV and slightly blocking my view of the pretty ending FMV. I leaned around him to see. "How is Proud Mode any different from all the other times? It's the same story and the same movies."

I flashed a wicked grin at him. "Because Proud Mode has the slightly-easier-to-get Secret Movie," I answered, patting the edge of the bed for him to sit down. He fixed me with a glare, and then turned to leave.

"You're hopeless," he sighed, shaking his head.

"Hey, I'm not the one that has all three 'Lord of the Rings' movies memorized, to the point that I can speak Elvish!" I shot back, watching him bristle. I made a smug noise of satisfaction to myself, knowing that I knocked Peter down a few rungs on the "You're a bigger geek than I am" ladder, and settled to watch the rest of the credit cut scenes, followed by the epilogue, followed by the Secret Movie.

Of course, I'd seen it on YouTube, but that isn't as special as EARNING it. The ending concluded, the swells of "Hand in Hand" finished, and with a click and a whirr, my TV screen went blank. I leaned forward in anticipation, waiting for the words "Sunset Horizons" to flash across my screen.

I waited a bit longer. Nothing.

"Okay…" I muttered to myself, getting up to inspect my TV and PS2. Both seemed fine and in working order. The PS2 was still humming softly, its green power light still glowing steadily. The TV was still on. I grabbed a bottle of water from the case on my floor, and turned to my computer. After all, when it came to fandom, Live Journal always had the answer.

After posting about the oddities I was experiencing, I turned again to my TV - I had left it on, incase the movie started – but instead of the blank screen I had left, there was the image of a white door. Words began to appear at the bottom of the screen.

_This world… has been connected_.

I tapped the screen. Was this some kind of joke? I spent all that time trying to beat Proud Mode, and all I got was some reference to Kingdom Hearts 1? And the door on my screen really did look like the door to Kingdom Hearts from the first game.

New words were appearing. _Will you open the door? Yes. No._

I snorted. Okay, I had definitely seen this before. The PS2 all of a sudden becomes a portal to another world. Clearly I was dreaming and needed to seriously cut back on my time spent at Kingdom Spork. Hallucinations like this could not be healthy.

So, instead of choosing yes or no, I did what anyone sane would do. I turned my PS2 off.

The image on my screen didn't vanish. In fact, new words were appearing. _You cannot escape the darkness. It will come_.

… Well that was a little freaky, but still feeling rather like a badfic hallucination. And there was always a very simple solution for getting rid of freaky images on your TV screen.

The TV and PS2 were promptly unplugged. I dusted off my hands and headed out of my room to go talk to Andy or Peter. Maybe they'd bring some sanity back into my life.

I stared at the ground, trying to piece my thoughts together and looking at my feet as I made my way down the short hallway my room and the bathroom were attached to, rounded the corner into the main hallway, and ran straight into a large, intricately-carved door that had suddenly sprouted in the middle of my drab dormitory hallway.

I gaped at the quite familiar door for a few seconds before stating dumbly, "That does not belong here." The doors, seeming to understand my presence, creaked open, allowing almost-tangible darkness to seep out and creep across the floor towards me. "You're joking," I said to the door, wondering why I was even _talking_ to the door. "You want me to go in there and go on some madcap Mary Sue adventure with OMGPONIES SORA AND KAIRI AND RIKU?"

The door creaked open wider, and soft voices whispered in the darkness _come, come, come_.

I turned to walk away, to escape, but behind me was impenetrable nothingness. To my right, the hallway with my room had also faded, leaving nothing but a small trail back to reality, back to sanity. A quickly fading trail that, because I had hesitated, vanished. It left only the door as my method of escape, so I gritted my teeth and reached for the handle.

"If I'm gonna be plunged into badfic land, I might as well try to make my story worth reading," I thought, and then stepped through the doors into what would surely be an adventure of stupid proportions. I figured it'd at least make a good spork.

Of course, karma has a way of mocking me. The world I had landed in was… familiar. Too familiar. So familiar that panic quickly crept into the edges of my thoughts. _I'll take anything,_ I thought. _I don't care if it's "The Black Cauldron," or "Haunted Mansion." Hell, I'll even take something crap-my-pants scary like "It" or "Nightmare on Elm Street," ANY world would be better than-_

A loud bell clanged, and several teenagers poured out of drab doors and rushed to lockers, gossiping and complaining and talking animatedly.

High School. That damn door had dumped me into the middle of a high school.

"Oh my GAWD," one preppy girl drawled as she texted someone on her cell phone. "You will not believe what I heard today!"

Another girl on my left, this time dressed in impeccably stylish punk fashion, flashed the finger at the preppy girl and said to her friend "I hate preps, don't you?"

As I surveyed the scene around me, it slowly dawned on me that I (vaguely) recognized every face I saw. I saw multitudes of strange clones of anime characters, quite a few altered Disney characters, and I could have sworn that somewhere, I saw white puppy ears above the other heads. It dawned on me slower than it should have.

Not only was I back in high school. The world I was in was a High School Alternate Universe Fan Fiction.

To this day, I don't believe I've ever yelled "shit" as loudly as I did then.

Every eye in the hall was suddenly on me. Well, so much for blending in. Very soon, the crowd parted as the booming voice of Christopher Lee echoed through the halls. "Miss Yahiko!" he, or rather, Ansem thundered. "Into my office this instant, young lady."

I trudged after Principal Ansem the Wise, and plonked down in the seat across from his desk. He was fiddling with a file that had the name "Ryune Yahiko" stamped in big black letters across the front. Well, that was fantastic. Obviously whatever fanbrat was writing this story didn't have the wits to name an obviously European-descended girl with a name that matched her ethnicity. I had resisted the urges to look in a mirror or at my clothes, concerned that I would have to spend all of five minutes describing what I was wearing or what I looked like so far, but I was beginning to fear that it was some generic sparkly-poo Mary Sue crap. Principal DiZ cleared his throat sternly, snapping me out of my panicked reverie.

"Miss Yahiko," he said with a scowl. "You are the best and brightest this school has to offer. Not only are your exemplary grades and numerous awards for speech competitions a shining example to your fellow students, any visitors or new comers we may have should also follow your lead." Well, at least my scholastic achievements hadn't changed. "However," he continued, "swearing of that magnitude is something I would expect out of those deplorable punks, not one such as yourself."

"Therefore," he stated, getting up and heading towards an adjacent door. "Your punishment shall be to show our newest transfer student around the hallowed halls of Literary Crossings High School."

He opened the door, and to my amazement (but not surprise), a teenaged boy with spiky brown hair and bright blue eyes. "Erm, hi," he said, waving nervously. "I'm Sora."

Principal DiZ gave him an odd look, and made a gesture that he should say more. Sora looked baffled for a moment, and started, as if he suddenly remembered something. "Right, Sora… uh… Hikari."

I choked down a guffaw, and as DiZ shooed us out of the room, I glared at him skeptically, eyebrow raised. "Sora Hikari? Really, is that the best you could come up with?"

"Well, the King said I was supposed to play along and – hey, how did you know?" he said, surprised.

"I'm not exactly from around here myself."

"Really? Then maybe, you know what's going on here?"

"No, I'm not from around here. And yes, I do know what's going on. What this world is called is a "High School AU." Meaning, it's High School, but with everyone from every other world out there turned into a teenager to endure the horrors of high school for the expense of creativity. It mostly gets written for the buttsex though."

Sora frowned. "It's a story?"

I shrugged, trying to avoid the subject of 'hey, in my world you're a fictional character,' and instead replied, "Every world is a story. It's how well or poorly it's told that makes the difference."

He folded his arms behind his head, starting to relax. "Boy, isn't that true," he said with a grin. "Hey, you seem pretty smart, aside from that Ansem-clone thinking you are. What's your name? I mean, your real one?"

"Rena," I said, extending my hand for a handshake. "Ryune is only a name I use when I'm online, which probably explains why it became my alias here."

Sora took my hand a shook it, but seemed a bit confused. "Online?"

I waved a hand in front of my face, diffusing the subject. "Long story."

We headed further down the hall. "I'm looking for my friends," Sora said after a bit of silence. "They're around here somewhere, but I have no idea where."

"Probably stuck as teachers," I replied, inspecting the generic high school setting.

Sora made a face, then laughed. "Donald? And Goofy? Teachers? Oh man, that's funny."

"I bet," I said, smiling in spite of myself.

There was another pause, and Sora spoke again. "Hey, do you think there are any heartless here … you do know what heartless are, right?"

"Yeah, but I don't know if we'll find any here. This place probably has something much scarier."

"Like those?" he said, voice layered over a scintillating pop as the keyblade appeared in his hands.

I turned around to see a mass of wriggling, brightly colored monsters with a strange, deformed star-shaped symbol on their chests. They hissed and giggled as they crept closer to us. I sighed in exasperation. "Yes, Sora, like those."


End file.
